Fear City to Eleventh Hour, a Halloween guide to haunted houses

October 18, 2012|By Doug George, Chicago Tribune reporter

Three quick tips about haunted houses to start off this guide to Halloween 2012:

Tip No. 1: Haunted houses, the ticket-selling kind, versus the rumor-shrouded Victorian Gothic kind at the end of your street, are mostly slasher flicks come to life. You know the way those movies build tension by sending a teenager down a gloomy hallway with the surety that someone — or something — was going to jump out at them? That's the experience of most haunted houses, more or less. If you like those movies ("Friday the 13th," "Prom Night," et al.), you'll like haunted houses. If not, you won't.

Tip No. 2: Haunted houses need not be either haunted or houses. Dream Reapers is across from a Navistar truck plant. Eleventh Hour Haunted House is aka Berthold's Garden Center in Elk Grove Village.

With all that in mind, and with suggestions from year-round enthusiasts (thanks, Adam Drendel of hauntedillinois.com), we bring you eight options for your Halloween:

Dream Reapers Haunted House

Among the gritty haunted houses, a gritty standout. This place is in an industrial building in Melrose Park, and there's nothing pretty about it. But that, we suppose, is the point.

What it lacks in polished atmospherics — why bother with another stage set of a Gothic library when hanging nets and airbrushing will do? — Dream Reapers makes up for in energy. Sure, there are plenty of props and what industry types call "animatronics" — a motorized arm that reaches out of a casket — but of the places visited, few other haunted houses had so many live actors after our skins with such ferocity. Screaming like they meant it, dragging chains and crawling along the floor after our ankles, they get our kudos. (Surely that cage will keep the guy with the power tools away from me?) We emerged half-blind, mostly deaf and genuinely roughed up.

This is the 13th season for Dream Reapers, says co-owner Jim Talent, and its last; their lease is up at the end of the year. "It's bittersweet," he said. "But we want to go out as a legend."

As we were on the way into Fear City the other night, one of the pre-show nasties started baiting my wife. "Tonight," he said to her nastily, as the color drained from her face, "maybe you'll be lying in his arms, but it will be my face in your head. I will be coming to you. You'll be dreaming of me." He looked over at me dismissively, snorted, let out a diabolical laugh and headed off to scare some other wimpy sucker.

And that was just the emasculating prequel at this unparalleled haunted house — a colossal, expectations-exceeding haunted warehouse in Morton Grove, created for the first time last year by alumni of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and assorted grizzled veterans of the Chicago set-design business, and done up as a kind of post-apocalyptic Chicago.

It's hard to overstate the level of detail with which the horrors are re-created. Imagine someone took all the things in the city that half-scare us already — the "L," being stuck at Midway Airport, getting operated on in one of those rusty hospitals that sit by our freeways — and brought them to life in a series of hellish, Chicago-style grottoes connected by mazes and creepy guides who pop up uninvited and then vanish just as quickly. One of my particular favorites is the meatpacking butcher — imagine a Chicago dream where you're headed to one of those trendy West Loop bars and take a wrong turn right into the gut of what that neighborhood used to be. You get the idea. Fear City is Chicago's collective nightmare, writ large.

As in 2011, you can take a ride on a life-size haunted "L" train (a refugee from some movie set), sit in an airliner where the oxygen masks sure as heck have dropped from the ceiling, and enter one of those homes you hear about on the local news, where the smell of some hoarder finally starts to bother the neighbors. The human cast members don't concentrate on making people jump but on forging genuinely terrifying characters — one woman, playing a psychotic little girl with a weird sweetness, kept me awake that night. For real.

There's also a new haunted house called Hades. You would not want to head out to Morton Grove just for Hades, but as a $10 add-on to Fear City it's well worth it — virtually the entire experience takes place in pitch black.